adventures in colouring outside the lines

Menu

gardening

I’ve had this book, One Magic Square: Grow your own food on one square metre by Lolo Houbein, on my bookshelf for several years. I bought it because the concept of being able to grow food by starting small, in a one metre by one metre square, appealed to me. I’m a victim of the big-thinking-but-not-acting-because-it’s-all-too-overwhelming mindset (not just in gardening, although my lack of a food garden is one of my more notable achievements in this sphere).

I’ve had vegetable patches in the past, and in the years BK (Before Kramstable) I’d spend hours working in the garden. I had visions in those years that if I was to ever have a child, she (whom I’d named Angelica Rose) and I would carry on my passion, spending hours together growing our own food, talking and having a wonderful time.

However, in one of life’s great lessons, the reality of actual parenthood is rarely like the parenthood you imagined. Kramstable (as well as not being a girl called Angelica Rose – thankfully for him and me; I would never choose that name now!) hasn’t really showed much interest in my garden, so the dream never came to fruition. (We never did any of those crafty activities that all the parenting books and blogs led me to believe I’d be partaking in either, and Kramstable’s interest in his cars and train set was conspicuous in its absence. So it’s true. Your kid will never be the kid in the “250 Activities Your Toddler Will Love and You Can Do Without Spending a Cent” books, and that’s perfectly fine. He’s who he is, not a model child from a book.)

Back to the book.

I’d skimmed through it a couple of times and vaguely thought that the idea of a square metre plot seemed doable, even though my weekend free time was limited. But it never eventuated, and the book has sat on the Shelf Of Good Intentions since then.

After I read Barbara Kingsolver’s book, I knew I couldn’t ignore the need to get growing any longer. But where to start? Last year I started by throwing some old pea seeds into a pot, which took off pretty well only to be felled by a couple of hot days just as they’d started podding. I realised I already had the basic infrastructure in place: four raised garden beds that I’d dug into the hill a couple of years ago, with the view of a putting in place a rotating system supplemented by letting the chooks scratch up each one for three months, followed by three months rest.

Actually I think the plan was to have five beds, so one for each season and one resting. The other one is still unconstructed in the shed and I don’t have the energy to dig another square metre into the hill right now!

The book has four parts. The first part is what appealed to me most: 60 pages of magic square metre plots, from which you can choose one, suitable for the season, to start straight away. These include salad plots, stir-fry plots, pizza/pasta plots and soup plots, which contain complementary mixes of vegetables. There is also a mono-crop option, where you fill the square with one crop and once each is done, put in another seasonally-appropriate crop.

To get started, Ms Houbein suggests you go out to the garden, dig over a square metre and choose your first plot. Then go to the nursery, get the seeds or seedlings, a bag of blood and bone and a bag of soil to top up the bed.come home, prepare the bed, plant the seeds or seedlings according to the plan and water them in.

Apart from the actual digging over of the bed, it will only take you a few moments to become a food gardener.

While you’re waiting for your plants to grow, you can read the rest of the book to learn more about food gardening, how to grow the plants you’re interested in, and why growing your own food is so important.

Part two provides an overview promoting similar ideas that Ms Kingsolver wrote about: the industrialisation and globalisation of food, and the enormous havoc this plays on both our planet and our health.

“There is no cheap food,” writes Ms Houbein. “Consider the real cost of a cucumber in a plastic jacket, grown in a temperature-controlled poly tunnel, refrigerated, put in the jacket, transported a great distance, and displayed in an air-conditioned supermarket under burning lights. The cucumber you grew yourself has to be fresher, tastier and healthier than that.”

Indeed it does! And the third part of book tells you how to do that. It’s made up of about 20 short sections covering things you need to know about in your garden like watering, compost, mulch, weeds, saving seed and pruning. It’s all useful information when you need it rather than as a read through once like I did.

The final part of the book provides more detail on how to grow specific food plants.

Overall I found it a very thought-provoking and interesting book, though I did struggle with reading it through as a whole. Having said that, it’s not really the sort of book you’re supposed to read through once and forget about. You’re supposed to get out there and plant stuff!

And that’s the next step I have to take. Beds 1 and 2 are ready for their winter plantings. Today’s excuse is that it’s raining . . .

I’ll start this post with a confession: I’ve never read any of Barbara Kingsolver’s novels, although I’ve long been intrigued by titles like The Poisonwood Bible and Pigs In Heaven.

I first saw this book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life on Instagram, where one of my friends, Mrs Smyth, posted a photo of it and commented on what a great book it was. And it really is! It tells the story of how Ms Kingsolver and her family pack up their life in Tuscon Arizona, move to a farm owned by her husband, Steven Hopp, in Virginia, and attempt to live for a year without industrial food. That is, food grown and raised locally – either food they grew themselves, or food from “so close to home [they’d] know the person who grew it”. The plan was to spend a year “in genuine acquaintance” with the sources of their food, with only extraordinary reasons for sourcing something from outside their state or county.

I loved this idea, and was hooked on their journey as soon as I picked up the book. The timing was fitting: March is the month of the Tassievore challenge, something I’d been an enthusiastic participant in for the last two years, but hadn’t quite gotten into this year.

The book, published in 2007, begins as the family drives out of Tuscon and, ironically, given the forthcoming venture, calls into a gas station for fuel and junk food. It makes the point that “the average food item on a US grocery shelf has travelled farther than most families go on vacation”. Ms Kingsolver observes that the energy used by producing and transporting food far outweighs the energy we get from consuming it. The case for eating locally grown food is compelling. “If every US citizen ate just one meal a week composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.”

Ms Kingsolver weaves the story of her family’s efforts to eat locally or do without with observations on the status of food in our modern life, and the book includes some brief articles by Steven Hopp that provide some interesting facts and statistics on issues raised in the book.

She writes of the conflict between cheap convenience industrial food and small locally-driven enterprises trying to stand up to chemical companies, big food producers, supermarkets and governments. It’s a story that plays out everywhere: small egg producers battling ever-increasing red tape to get truly fresh eggs from happy chickens to their customers; Elgaar Farm having to crowdfund new equipment to continue to be able to produce their products using centuries-old methods and still being tied up in the approval process; Two Metre Tall making glorious beer through natural fermentation that the big brewers claim is “off” because they don’t understand the methods.

I found myself nodding at pretty much every point Ms Kingsolver makes in the book. I’m not sure that everything she describes happens in Australia, or to the same extent, but the overall picture is the same – we live in a society that is largely disconnected from its food sources, demands everything all year round, wants cheap and convenient – all of which comes at a huge price – our health, animal welfare, the environment and local farms to name just a few things. Cheap might be good for our hip pockets, but we pay for it in other ways.

The commentary on the current situation was somewhat deflating, and made me wonder if there really is any hope for the world to reconnect with its food and to get back to more sustainable ways of feeding ourselves. But the anecdotes and stories of what people are doing at a local level made me feel more positive, in spite of the massive obstacles that exist.

I loved reading about Ms Kingsolver’s youngest daughter Lily establish her own poultry enterprise at the age of nine; the fact that Ms Kingsolver had to check the security of the house whenever they left in zucchini season so the the neighbours couldn’t break in and leave zucchinis for them; and the wonderful story of buying a huge pumpkin in Italy, hacking it open at their accommodation and trying to dry the seeds out during their trip so they could take them home. Oh and the expose on the sex life of turkeys, which was horrifying, fascinating, amusing, and ultimately heartwarming.

There’s also a very thought provoking chapter on meat eating when it comes time to harvest the poultry that’s destined for the pot.

Each chapter ends with some thoughts from Ms Kingsolver’s eldest daughter Camille on her perspective on the family’s project, as well as some of her recipes and meal plans for the produce that is available in season each month. These are also available on the website.

I love the whole idea of this project, and would love to be in a position to be able to commit to doing something similar. 12 months of Tassievore-ing and getting food from my own backyard! It seems quite doable at this time of the year when the markets are overflowing with beautiful fresh produce. Ask me again in July or August. I was encouraged by the fact that Ms Kingsolver and her family didn’t end up eating dandelions (or roadkill) in the leaner months like other people they knew of that had attempted similar projects.

Realistically I know that doing this would mean some fairly big changes, a large vegetable garden and time I don’t have. But rather than giving up, I have to get out of the habit of all-or-nothing thinking. No, I can’t source absolutely everything I eat from my backyard and from people in my immediate area that I know personally, but this doesn’t mean I can’t do anything at all. This book has inspired me to start thinking about some smaller changes I can make to increase the amount of local food in my diet. One baby step at a time.

A boring Saturday at home. The first day of my “let’s try getting up earlier and doing some things I have to do in the morning instead of lazing around and then having to rush out the door at swimming time because I couldn’t be bothered having breakfast and getting dressed until 10 minutes before we had to leave, and having all the things not done at the end of the day.”

That seemed to go well.

1 of 12 – It’s been a cold winter. Really cold. Just lately there have been signs it’s coming to an end, but we all know that this is just a teaser before we’re plunged back into freezing temperatures. But for the next couple of days, it’s going to be really nice. Forecast top today: 20 degrees, actual top: 22 degrees. Quite a contrast with where we’ll be in two weeks.

1 of 12

2 of 12 – Juniordwarf volunteered to make us coffee this morning. He used to do it all the time a couple of years ago but fell out of the habit. Unfortunately the coffee machine goes through temperamental phases, which makes coffee very hit and miss. Today was one of those days.

2 of 12

3 of 12 – One of the things Juniordwarf does is help make breakfast when we have eggs. Now that the chooks are laying again, we’ve got a good supply. Fresh eggs, sautéed kale and my favourite bread from Pigeon Whole. Nice way to start the day. And yes, I do have my breakfast on Juniordwarf’s “Bunnykins” plate.

3 of 12

4 of 12 – I had to prune back this boronia (I think) bush because it was in the way of me being able to see where the chooks are. By “prune” I means chopping off anything in my line of vision. Note to self: clean kitchen window.

4 of 12

5 of 12 –Swimming lesson day.

5 of 12

Remember a couple of months ago when I didn’t have anything to take photos of so I went for a walk around town. (It was actually May) Here are some updates.

6 of 12 – Not so much an update as something totally new. This building has been a couple of restaurants since we’ve been here, but has been empty for several years. Looks like it will be back in use again soon.

6 of 12

7 of 12 – Lees Corner. The old site of Banjo’s, the lolly shop and Sintonic, which burnt down in 2012, and has sat unused since. They are now making it into a small park until the owners decide what to do with it. The work started in May. Apparently it was supposed to be finished by the end of May.

7 of 12

8 of 12 – Happy springtime!

8 of 12

9 of 12 – Old cottage, meet new hardware store. Bad luck if you want any light. In May this was the site of lots of puddles and diggers. It used to be the site of old fruit packing sheds.

9 of 12

10 of 12 – Anyone want to buy an old supermarket?

10 of 12

11 of 12 – This is the latest addition to the Willow Court site – new gates in front of the old Barracks. (I know. It’s been there several months. There are conflicting opinions on the suitability of this style for a historic site.)

11 of 12

12 of 12 – We are very lucky to be able to have Two Metre Tall Beer-fed Beef delivered to our front door.

I used to live in my vegetable garden. I’d quite happily spend all weekend in there, get totally engrossed, completely lose track of time, and occasionally even get something to eat from it.

Then we moved back to Tasmania, had a child and my passion for gardening disappeared into the cracks between dirty nappies, the Wiggles, play group, rushing between work and daycare and, later on, school and work.

I tried, but my old garden was full of oxalis, stinging nettles and stickyweed. With a small child, I didn’t have as much time to devote to it, and when I did get a chance to get out there, all I ever did was battle the weeds. It wasn’t enjoyable any more.

In the end I gave up my dream of a productive vegetable garden. Much as I had loved gardening, the spark had gone. I couldn’t spend the time in the garden I wanted to and was used to, and when I did go in there I didn’t enjoy it, or I felt bad for taking time away from Juniordwarf. So I didn’t go in there at all.

I felt enormously guilty. I was a self-proclaimed ‘gardener’ who didn’t have a garden. I wanted to grow food, but it all seemed so hard.

Then we moved into a house we both loved, but one with a yard that was mega-challenging in terms of its slope. I describe it as a cliff. It’s not far off that.

And we got chooks. Instant fertiliser! Instant destruction!

I dug out a few flat spots and installed some 1×1 metre raised beds, which is where the straw and chook poo goes to rot down and nourish the soil. My original idea was to have 5 of these beds that I could rotate over a 12 month period, with 3 being used to grow vegetables at any one time, one being the leave-alone-to-break-down bed and one being the add-the-fresh-stuff-to bed.

So far I’ve put 3 of the 5 together. I haven’t planted anything in any of them. I just keep adding straw and poo. The chooks get into them and scratch them up and most of the straw ends up on the ground.

Most of the time it all seems to hard to figure out what to plant, when to plant it, how to get the beds filled up enough to grow something in, how to keep the chooks out, how to maintain it once I’ve planted it. Everything I can come up with has become an excuse for why I’m not gardening.

And I’ve sat here for weeks, months, looking at these damn garden beds, telling myself off for not taking the next steps towards using them and feeling incredibly guilty that I’m not growing a single food for myself. I’ve been feeling totally in conflict with my own belief that growing your own is a good and important thing.

But in this last couple of weeks I’ve had a slight shift in perspective, which has got me going again.

In Lisa Grace Byrne’s book ‘Replenish’(which is a book I would highly recommend if you are a strung-out, overwhelmed mother or just plain old strung-out and overwhelmed), she talks about the principle of starting where you are.

Lisa tells the story of a very overweight woman who decided she wanted to take dance classes. At first all the woman could do was go to the class and sway to the music. But she didn’t let this stop her. She kept going to the class each week and she did what she could. Very slowly she started to be able to do a bit more, and then a bit more. Eventually she started fully participating in the class and she went several times a week. But she didn’t start out like that. She started by doing what she could do, which was turn up and sway.

Last week’s Tassievore Eat Local challengewas to grow something. I already had a couple of herb pots on the go but they’ve survived by good luck rather than good management.

I wanted to do the Tassievore challenge, but as soon as I started making a list of all the things I’d have to do to get my first garden bed ready to plant something, I started to make excuses about why I couldn’t do it. There were too many obstacles and I didn’t have the time. It looked like this was going to be another good idea that I didn’t go through with.

Then the other night one of my lovely Twitter folk said they’d started sowing peas. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just a tweet about sowing peas. I love peas. I’ve always wanted to grow peas, but I never have. I tried once and they all died. I still want to. I think about doing it a lot.

But at that moment something in my brain clicked. Why can’t I sow some peas? Why can’t I just throw a few seeds in and see what happens? No fancy soil preparation (no preparation at all, fancy or otherwise), no checking the calendar to see if it’s the right time (if a farmer is doing it then that’s good enough for me), no moon phase timing, no fencing out the chooks. Nothing. Forget the garden bed. Just do it.

So I went out and did it. I chucked some seeds into a pot on my deck and watered them. It took about 5 minutes.

Maybe peas

The seeds are past their best-by date and the potting mix is a bit dry, so I don’t hold out much hope, but I’ve tried. I’ve shown up. I’ve thrown some seeds out there. I’ve started where I am. The list of jobs I’d set myself to do before I started gardening again was so overwhelming that it was stopping me doing anything at all. I don’t think that’s a good place to be.

Now I’ve done something. I’m the lady in the dance class. She didn’t expect to be dancing beautifully the first week of class, and I shouldn’t expect to have a perfectly planned and set up garden bed today.

You don’t walk 25,000 steps a day by going out and walking for 3 hours today. Starting big is unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. You start out with a flourish and then exhaust yourself after a few days or weeks and you give up. (Or at least that’s what I do.)

If you want to walk 25,000 steps a day, you start by telling yourself that when you get home you’ll put your bag down and go for a walk around the block instead of collapsing on the couch and going on Twitter.

You set the bar so low you can’t fail. Then you do it. And you do it tomorrow and the next day. Once you’ve started small and succeed consistently, it gets easier to get bigger.

I was going about my gardening the wrong way. I was aiming for 25,000 steps a day when I should have been aiming to just get out the door.

‘All or nothing’ creates inaction. If I can’t do it all (and I can’t do it perfectly and be completely prepared with all the information I could ever possibly need) then I’m not going to do anything. This doesn’t get me to where I want to be, because I’ll never get started. It’s pretty obvious isn’t it?

I’ve known this for a long time, but haven’t ever really accepted it as true. The message from Lisa Byrne and the lady in the dance class of ‘start where you are, do what you can do right at this moment and keep showing up’ has been forging a stronger course through my subconscious than I realised.

I’ve heard this same message many many times since I was a child:

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” – Lao Tzu

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.” – attributed to Goethe

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” – Arthur Ashe

“Just do it.” – Nike slogan

For once it sunk in and all it took was that one simple tweet about sowing peas to get me up and out the door.

If I’d sat and thought about what I needed to do to get to the point of being able to sow some seeds, I wouldn’t have done it. There would have been too much to do to get ready. I did what I could do right then and there, and either nothing will happen or I’ll get peas.

That’s OK because I’ll also get some coriander and some baby spinach (or I won’t) because I put some of those seeds in last week too. That’s 3 lots of seeds more than if I’d decided to wait until I was ready.

It felt really good to take some action.

The sum total of my growing efforts this year. Coriander seeds on the bottom right.

This baby spinach has managed to self seed from some spinach that went to seed over summer.

I wrote a post about getting started last week, and have been doing what I can for Week 1’s challenge, which has been to “seek out Tasmanian food and drinks . . . whether an old apple tree on the side of the road, a bottle of wine you haven’t tried before, or a recipe that has tweaked your interest”.

Funnily enough, the apple trees on the side of the road that I noticed last Sunday got pruned to within an inch of their lives during the week. Something about power lines, I believe . . .

Foraging at my house is primarily the search for eggs.

The oldest chicken decided long ago that the laying box wasn’t for her and has taken to laying in a spot in some bushes that we’ve nicknamed The Egg Butty. This comes from something Juniordwarf used to do when he was very small, and it kind of stuck. She’s had more than one Egg Butty over the years, but this is the current go-to spot.

Egg Butty

The new chickens are gradually getting used to laying and are figuring out where to do it. One of them has even found the laying box.

Laying box

The other one has decided it’s better to lay in the very back of the chook house, between the two perches, right in the chook shit from the night. She invariably knocks the perches off and we have to perform contortionist acts to get the egg and set the perches back up.

Not the laying box

Foraging in my own back yard.

One of the new chickens

I also got 2 strawberries off my plant this week. I think that’s about 10 now. None of the other plants have fruited, so 6 plants for $10, and 10 strawberries = $1 per strawberry. Bargain! At least they aren’t fumigated with methyl bromide.

Gourmet strawberries

And by happy accident I discovered a self-seeded oregano plant in amongst my pennyroyal in one of the most shady parts of the yard. How it got there is anyone’s guess, but I’m not complaining.

Feral oregano

Because I managed to kill my raspberry plants, I didn’t get any raspberries this year. So as a consolation, I’ve been drinking the raspberry cider from Two Metre Tall. It’s very good.

My main source of raspberries this year – note deliberately out of focus cider so you can read the sign in the background (ahem)

I had a couple of ideas of new places to go foraging, but other things got in the way and I didn’t make it.

I did pick up some Tasmanian produce from Eumarrah in Hobart, and I really like the new labelling that Hill St Grocer has for its fruit and vegetables.

Apples at Eumarrah

Garlic at Eumarrah

Hill St’s produce labelling

This morning we went to our local market, the Big River Growers Market, which has some wonderful people with fantastic produce (and also excellent laksa).

Big River Growers Market

Laksa!

And we were walking past a new business that has recently opened, so decided to have a look in there and picked up a few different vegetables as well.

Spud Hut

So we ended up getting a pretty good haul for the weekend.

Weekend’s haul

And dinner tonight was accompanied by one of my favourite wines (which I foraged for in my fridge because I needed wine for the dinner recipe . . .)

Derwent Estate Chardonnay

Week 2’s challenge is to “grow your own”.

I used to be a gardening fanatic, but since we’ve been in this house – in fact probably since we had Juniordwarf – my commitment to the garden has declined and I haven’t grown anything (successfully) for several years.

Today was Monday and I was in Hobart for work. The forecast was a mostly sunny day, 15 to 24 degrees.

1 of 12 – One of the new habits I am trying to get into (I’m not calling them resolutions because we all know we don’t stick to New Year’s resolutions – so I’m trying to form new habits) is going for a walk every morning. I fell out of this habit after my massive Walk in Her Shoes effort in March last year, so it’s well past time to get the shoes out and give this another go. Plus my doctor said I had to do it.

2 of 12 – I’ve set myself a target of a 30 minute walk each day. At the moment I can walk for 30 minutes in the mornings, but that might have to change when school goes back. My pace is pretty slow right now, but at least I’m doing it every day. (I didn’t record Saturday because we were at the Tahune AirWalk.)

3 of 12 – Here is our shiny new bus stop. Today I got there before the bus did. I think that’s a bit too enthusiastic.

4 of 12 – Because I don’t have to take Juniordwarf to school, I’m usually at work by about 5 past 8 in the mornings.

5 of 12 – One thing that gives my work building character is the regularly malfunctioning lifts. This morning none of them were working, so I got some bonus exercise by having to walk up many flights of stairs.

6 of 12 – And then it was time for coffee.

7 of 12 – Another new habit I’m trying to cultivate is replacing some of my coffee breaks with herbal tea. I don’t like actual tea, but some of the herbal infusions are quite tasty. I bought a tea pot a while ago with the idea of making brews and letting them sit there for a while so I could have a steady supply of the stuff. It makes a nice change from plain water.

8 of 12 – Setting up Princes Wharf 1 for MOFO, which starts later this week. Paul Kelly is coming and I can’t go because I have something else on 😦

9 of 12 – I posted a picture of the Brooke Street Pier development in November after the new pier had been floated up the river. The work is continuing.

10 of 12 – Some little boats and a big cruise ship.

11 of 12 – There is still a trace of pink in my hair from my Molly Ringwald dress-up in October. This will teach me to never dye my hair again.

Monday 12 May was the start of the second week of school. All the good work I’d done getting back into a walking routine before the holidays started has gone out the window and I’m back to doing nothing. I just can’t bring myself to set the alarm for 5am . . .

1 of 12 – and the reason for this is probably because I’ve been staying up until after midnight most nights. Yesterday’s excuse was that I was reliving some of the fun of the weekend’s Eurovision Song Contest.

2 of 12 – I’m still struggling with trying to give up fructose. I made this choc-nut granola from Sarah Wilson’s new book to try and console my sweet tooth.

3 of 12 – It’s autumn! St David’s Park is looking very pretty.

4 of 12 – This is what’s left of the old Government Print Building and the old PABX building in Salamanca Place.

5 of 12 – I’m not being very successful at drinking more water during the day either.

6 of 12 – Monday is a heavy walking day. Time to bust out the new shoes.

7 of 12 – Macquarie Street late afternoon. I want to know that little box on top of that building is.

8 of 12 – Pretty autumn colour.

9 of 12 – It’s getting darker a lot earlier now.

10 of 12 – Juniordwarf’s current thing on the way home is to stop in the ABC Shop and look at the Ben & Holly books.

11 of 12 – Jack’s back!

12 of 12 – Every time one of the Diggers Club catalogues arrive in the mail I feel very miserable that I’ve done nothing in the garden recently.